The story behind our 85% talent retention rate in a country in crisis

In 2022, the World Bank described Lebanon's financial and economic crisis as one of the worst the world has seen in more than 150 years. The local currency had lost 98% of its value. People's savings were frozen in bank accounts they could no longer access. Triple-digit inflation had become the norm. Power cuts and medicine shortage made life unbearable for most Lebanese.

That's the year I incorporated Supportful.

In this crazy context, when everything outside the company felt unstable, I was intentional about the company culture I wanted to build. Supportful is a software engineering staff augmentation company. We work with global tech startups looking to grow their teams remotely.

From day one, I was obsessed with one question: what kind of company would I have wanted to work at as a software engineer? I was sure it wasn’t the perk-focused kind of company. I was thinking of a company that cares about its employees’ growth and their wellbeing.

That question became the foundation of everything we built.

Treating culture as a product and employees as customers

Many companies treat culture as something that emerges from work, a byproduct of the team they hire and the values they post on a wall. We treat it as a product in its own right. Something you put craft and care into. Something you iterate on and get feedback about continuously.

But what is company culture? Culture is an abstract, yet a very tangible component of a company. It represents the organization’s way of working and values, or in other words, its DNA. And it’s pretty much influenced by the founder’s set of values and character.

Alongside that, we think about our engineers the way a great company thinks about its customers: their experience matters, and we are responsible for it. Happy employees are as important as happy customers.

I’ve been inspired by two leaders to think this way. The first is Dart Lindsley, founder of 11fold, who champions the idea of designing work as a product. The second is Andrew Boyagi, Customer CTO at Atlassian, who puts developer experience at the center of any engineering leadership vision. The most productive engineers are happy engineers.

When designing a great employee experience, we think about pay, growth, and the quality of the environment where they spend their working hours. While it sounds simple, it requires a significant mental shift for most leaders. And practical actions.

Some rituals that help

Philosophy without practice is just a poster on a wall. Here's some of what we actually do to walk the talk.

We hold short quarterly one-on-ones. These 30-minute conversations are designed to talk about the overall experience of the employee, including performance, planning, lessons learned, and open Q&A. The objective is for these sessions to be genuine and straightforward.

We run quarterly social events and one company retreat per year. These in-person gatherings help strengthen team bonds in a fully distributed team. Most social events are held around a meal which adds warmth to those gatherings. Lebanon being small and most of our team being there, we can afford to organize in-person events.

We organize internal knowledge-sharing workshops. Many of these are employee-led, because engagement goes up dramatically when people are running the room. Some are born directly from engineer feedback, which brings me to something important.

We survey our team frequently. After every event, we send out a short anonymous survey to get feedback in less than 3 minutes, and most importantly, to act on it.

One engineer once commented on how strange it felt to be in a team meeting where everyone had their cameras off. We then introduced a camera-on policy for team meetings.

Another piece of feedback flagged confusion about the onboarding process. We redesigned it to make it clearer and announced this change to the team. While we don’t know who exactly gave that feedback, we’re sure that they appreciated us listening and taking action accordingly.

Investing in growth

In the companies I worked at before, there was never a clear growth path. So I set out to put growth at the heart of the company, especially that lack of growth consistently ranks in the top 3 reasons for employee attrition.

In staff augmentation, one of the trickier dynamics is the question of who owns an engineer's career development. They work day-to-day inside a client's product and team. It would be easy to let the client's priorities fully define their trajectory.

We don't do that. Every year, we jointly build a training plan with each engineer. It's tailored to where they are today and where they want to be next. If someone is technically exceptional but wants to move into leadership, we invest in soft skills training. If someone wants to deepen a technical specialization, we support that.

Mistakes along the way

Getting to where we are today did not happen on a linear journey. There were mistakes and lessons learned along the way.

Something I got wrong early on was being on the retention extreme. I was so committed to keeping people that I was willing to bend company policies and absorb behaviors that were quietly eroding team cohesion. I told myself it was loyalty, while in fact it was just about avoiding conflict.

What I learned from a real situation that happened is the following: protecting the culture is protecting the people. Compromising one to save the other is a false trade.

What 85% actually means

Over four years, we've had three intentional departures: one engineer who pursued a career in academia, one who launched their own startup, and one who wanted to come back a few months later. That's it.

We didn't lose people to burnout. We didn't lose them to competitors or to the crisis swallowing everything around us. In an environment where companies were hemorrhaging talent and people were leaving the country in waves, our team stayed and grew.

But I’m not resting on our laurels. Maintaining a high talent retention rate is the output of numerous small yet intentional decisions made over time. I’m still refining our processes and culture tenets, now with the help of Maria Scarzella Thorpe, our People & Culture Officer.

Beyond the numbers we want to keep high, it’s our team’s feedback that reassures me we’re doing the right thing.

In one of our employee satisfaction surveys, an engineer left a comment in the open-ended field that I think about often: "I know that Supportful has my back."

That sentence is the whole point.

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